A maintenance supervisor at the South County Jail has been arrested and accused of accessing a computer that showed the shower area in the dormitory where female inmates are housed. Joseph C. Berry, 59, of Winter Haven, was arrested Thursday and charged with voyeurism, accessing a computer without authorization and grand theft.

By CLIFFORD PARODYTHE LEDGER

FROSTPROOF | A maintenance supervisor at the South County Jail has been arrested and accused of accessing a computer that showed the shower area in the dormitory where female inmates are housed.

Joseph C. Berry, 59, of Winter Haven, was arrested Thursday and charged with voyeurism, accessing a computer without authorization and grand theft.

He was released from the Polk County Jail on Friday on $5,500 bail. He could not be reached to comment Saturday.

Employees at the jail discovered in November that Berry was accessing the video surveillance system that monitors the women's dorm at the jail, according to an arrest affidavit from the Polk County Sheriff's Office.

Berry, who is employed by the county, had been directed to move the system out of his office, and he was told that if he needed to view the surveillance system for maintenance purposes, he should do so only from the jail's administration area, the affidavit said. However, it was discovered Berry had access to the system in the server room of the jail's central energy plant.

On Thursday, investigators found the surveillance system accessed in the server room of the energy plant and that Berry's user name had been used to access it. System logs showed the system had been accessed using his user name on four other occasions from November through January, the affidavit said.

According to the arrest report, Berry told jail employees not to tell his supervisors about the energy plant access because "they didn't need to know what they do at the South County Jail."

The women's dorm area is set up with an open shower area within camera view and the system is capable of zooming in on the shower area, the affidavit said.

Investigators went to Berry's home Thursday to interview him. There, he confirmed the user name investigators found on the monitor was his, and according to the affidavit, investigators also found a box with the word "jail" on it that contained air-conditioning filters of the same size used by Berry's home system.

They also found a battery backup and computer monitors that Berry acknowledged belonged to the county, the affidavit said.